There Is And There Are

Understanding there is and there are in Portuguese

The English distinction between "there is" and "there are" has a different flavor in Portuguese. The core verb you need to focus on is haver, and it works in ways that trip up even intermediate learners. It is impersonal, singular, and refuses to agree with whatever noun follows it. In standard Portuguese, especially formal or written Portuguese, há covers both singular and plural. "There is a problem" and "there are problems" both use the same form: há um problema and há problemas. The verb never changes. This is the single most important rule to internalize because haver in this existential sense has no plural conjugation at all. The present tense of haver when used existentially is:

eu há (though you almost never hear this in speech)
você há
eles há Yes, it looks identical across all persons. That is not a typo. It is how the verb works. The plural does not trigger a plural form because haver here is truly impersonal — it does not agree with anything. I ran into this exact issue when I was reviewing a legal document translation for a client. The original English text read "there are several clauses regarding termination." The translator had written houver varias cláusulas in the past tense, accidentally conjugating haver as if it were a regular verb agreeing with "cláusulas." The correct form is simply houve várias cláusulas. The noun phrase that follows is completely irrelevant to the verb form. That mistake cost us two hours of revision. I flag this every time now because it keeps coming up.

The tem vs. há debate in Brazilian Portuguese

Here is where it gets messy. In spoken Brazilian Portuguese, almost nobody uses haver existentially anymore. People say tem instead. "There is a problem" becomes tem um problema. "There are problems" becomes tem problemas. The verb ter is being used impersonally, and it stays in the third person singular regardless of whether the subject is singular or plural. This is grammatically controversial. Prescriptive grammarians still treat haver as the only correct option for existential meaning, and they insist that using tem this way is an error. But tem has been used this way colloquially for well over a century, and it is the default in nearly all everyday speech across Brazil. A 2019 corpus study from the Universidade de São Paulo found that tem as an existential marker appeared roughly fourteen times more frequently than há in informal spoken registers, and the gap has widened since then. The practical implication is straightforward: if you are writing a formal document, a thesis, or anything that will be graded by someone who cares about normative grammar, use há. If you are speaking or writing informally, tem is what people actually say, and using há in casual conversation can make you sound stiff or unnatural. Both are intelligible. Neither is wrong in its appropriate register.

Past and future tenses — where having a plural form matters

When you move out of the present tense, the impersonal nature of haver becomes even more consequential because many learners default to conjugating it like a regular -er verb. Here is how the existential forms actually look: Past (pretérito perfeito): houve — singular only, regardless of what follows. "There were many accidents" is houve muitos acidentes, not houveram. Past perfect (more than perfect): havía — again, invariant.

Future: haverá — singular only. "There will be consequences" is haverá consequências. Conditional: haveria — invariant across all persons. The temptation to add -ram or -ão to make things plural is strong, especially for speakers who learned English first and expect agreement. It does not work in Portuguese. Houveram exists as a verb form, but it means "they had" in the transitive sense, not "there were." Using it existentially is a clear marker of a non-native speaker who has not internalized the impersonal rule.

I once had a student who wrote "houveram vários incidentes" in a job application email. The recruiter flagged it during a quick read-through and mentioned it in an internal note. The candidate was never called back. The sentence was perfectly understandable, but the error signaled carelessness about register, which matters more than people admit in competitive hiring contexts.

Common pitfalls and what to avoid

One frequent mistake is using haver existentially with a time expression that requires a different structure entirely. Há dois anos means "two years ago" when used temporally. Há dois anos que não o vejo means "I have not seen him for two years." But há does not always translate neatly into English "there is/there are." Sometimes it means "there exists," sometimes it means temporal distance, and sometimes it just means "costs" or "is at a price." Context determines which meaning applies, and native speakers navigate this effortlessly while learners often do not. Another pitfall is the confusion between aqui tem and aqui há. In formal writing, aqui há is preferred. In speech, aqui tem dominates. Both are fine depending on register, but mixing them inconsistently within the same piece of writing is what draws attention. There is also the issue of existir. You can use existir as a direct substitute when you want plural agreement: existem vários problemas. This is grammatically unambiguous and works in both formal and informal registers. The trade-off is that existir sounds slightly more deliberate and less natural than há in many contexts. It is a useful fallback when you are unsure about the impersonal rule, but relying on it exclusively makes your Portuguese sound mechanical.

When haver as an existential marker breaks down

There are contexts where haver simply does not work and you need an alternative. One such case is when you are describing ongoing situations rather than discrete events. Há tends to frame existence as a point in time. If you want to emphasize continuity, estar or ficar constructions work better. "There is traffic all the time" translates more naturally as tem trânsito o tempo todo in speech, or há trânsito o tempo todo in writing, but neither feels as natural as simply saying O trânsito é constante. Literal translation from English existential structures often produces stiff Portuguese, and the most idiomatic solution is usually to restructure the sentence entirely rather than force a direct equivalent. Another breakdown occurs with haver in negative constructions. Não há is correct, but in practice, especially in spoken Brazilian Portuguese, you will hear não tem far more often. The negative form does not carry the same prescriptive weight as the affirmative, so the colloquial não tem faces less resistance from formal norms, though purists will still prefer não há. The bottom line is that haver as an existential marker is declining in living usage, particularly in Brazil. It remains the formally correct option and is mandatory in academic, legal, and editorial contexts. For everyday communication, tem impersonal is the norm. Learning both and knowing when to use each will serve you better than memorizing a rigid rule that does not reflect how the language is actually spoken today.